Re: [Synaptic-devel] Synaptic development

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Di, den 11.11.2003 schrieb Gustavo Niemeyer um 13:59:

Hello Gustavo,

> Notice that if a package is Installed, there are two possible actions.
> The user may either Remove or Upgrade the package. That's why we use
> toggle buttons after all. We don't have a 1x1 mapping.

There can even be more actions, since it is now possible to downgrade to
a specific version.

But do people really use the "Upgrade" so much often? I think that the
most common way of upgrading is to upgrade the whole system and not
single packages. That is how I do and people I know of.

INHO the main GUI should concentrate on providing a clear and fast way
of doing the most common tasks. This way the upgrade of a single package
is not hidden, but gets the percentage of gui space correlating to its
importance for the user.

Another point would be that the current status of a package is not very
easy to see. Ok, we got the "Installed version" column, but this is not
very clear, since the column could be out of the visible area and the
long string gets lost in all the text information of the table.

The status can be abstracted from the available toogle-buttons, but this
is also not very clear.

The status label is also not present on every tab and also gets  lost in
the whole detail area.

The options menu would provide a clear way of displaying the current
status of the package.

(I already suggested to show the installed status via an "i" in the
status column.)

> > Status: Not Installed 
> >     -> Action button: Install
> > 
> > Status: Changed
> >     -> Action button: Undo/Reset
> 
> Same issue here.. a "Changed" package must tell what kind of change
> is going to happen. The toggle button leaves that clear.

I am open to suggestions and changes. So the button could also reflect
the triggered action.

> Not in the near future. It will happen somewhere in the first half
> of 2004.

I cannot get on your homepage (http://www.conectiva.com/). So could you
please tell me the current version number of Conectiva. I want to give
an example in the documentation when upgrading to a new major release of
the OS. And I think that these examples should be Debian and Conectiva. 

Regards,

Sebastian